Ansible is the most popular open source automation tool on GitHub today with more than a quarter million downloads per month. With over 2,400 contributors submitting new modules all the time, rest assured that what you are automating is covered in Ansible already, or will be very soon."

Ansible was founded to provide a new way to think about managing systems and applications that better fit this new world. Historically, management vendors and home-grown scripting solutions were created to manage stacks of software on servers. In contrast, Ansible was created to orchestrate multi-tier applications across clouds. From configuration to deployment to zero-downtime rolling upgrades, Ansible is a single framework that can fully automate today’s modern enteprise apps.

OUR DIFFERENCE

Simple, agentless & powerful. Ansible’s simple, YAML-based automation syntax is quick to learn and easy for the entire organization to adopt. By utilizing SSH (on Linux/Unix) or WinRM & PowerShell (on Windows), Ansible doesn’t require an agent to do its magic. And Ansible does so much more than configuration management… Ansible can deploy apps and orchestrate complex tasks that other systems have a hard time doing.

Snapshot analysis: Third parties must be involved

While an interesting thought, Ansible, or for that matter any X86-based management and automation platform isn't sufficient to take on the role of enterprise-wide automation and management platform. In a traditional enterprise data center, there are just too many non-X86 platforms and solutions.

Providers of those other platforms, such as mainframes, midrange Unix systems, midrange single vendor system, and other non-X86-based platforms, must be persuaded to do part of the work to integrate their platform with Ansible. Another possibility, but one that wouldn't be supported by the primary supplier, is that the Ansible open source community does the integration work to allow Ansible to provide management and automation of workloads.

What is far more likely is that Ansible, at best, be only a part of a comprehensive solution for enterprises.

The enterprise data center looks like a computer museum. Today's workloads are built upon the foundation of those built 10 years ago. Those workloads are, in turn, built upon the foundation of those acquired or developed before that. If one wanders through the racks of many enterprise data centers, one is likely to find:

Mainframe applications acquired or developed in the 1960s through today

Intelligent networking equipment from a host (pun intended) of suppliers

Intelligent storage equipment from a host (pun also intended) of suppliers

Intelligent power management equipment

Intelligent cooling equipment

An amazing array of other things, such as facilities security, telephone systems, etc.

This means that when a supplier, Red Hat in this case, presents that an X86-based system is prepared to take on the role of the "one ring," the ring to rule them all, it is not likely to be completely true.

At best, it might help unify the management and automation of the industry standard workloads and, possibly, workloads on some midrange Unix systems. It is unlikely to help enterprises manage everything in the data center.

I'm looking forward to having a conversation with Red Hat about this after Summit ends.

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Daniel Kusnetzky, a reformed software engineer, is an IT industry analyst, consultant and author. He is known for his comments on systems software, virtualization technology and the infrastructure of cloud computing.